Determining a font applied to glyphs in a document has to date generally has been performed by examining properties of individual glyphs of a candidate font, and then comparing these individual glyphs to glyphs that may be discerned in the document. However, with poor reproductions of a document, the original glyphs in the document may be too distorted to provide convenient or reliable identification.
The identification of a font in which glyphs within a particular document have been set may be important when attempting to assess whether a particular document is authentic, or is a forgery. Further, where font identification is required for a large number of documents, the processing of a large volume of documents presents a number of technical challenges. For example, the above described method of examining the properties of individual glyphs of a candidate font, and then comparing them to glyphs seen in the document, can be a particularly time consuming operation and may also require an analyst to spend a number of hours studying a particular document.